The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
Issue No. 28 - 15 July 2010
In This Issue
Cutter BPM Glossary
Modeling Business Processes
Ateji OptimJ
Cloudwatching
Handling the Data Deluge
Seen Recently...
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The Cutter BPM Glossary is Published
As mentioned in Issue 25, Claude Baudoin wrote a BPM Glossary, published by Cutter at the end of June. You can read the abstract, and download your copy if you are a Cutter client, here.
If you are not a Cutter client, please contact cébé and we will get you a copy.
Modeling Business Processes
Alexander Samarin recently gave a webinar to the Business Ecology Initiative (BEI) on best practices to model processes. He said:
  • determine the main value-adding steps
  • don't have more than 7 steps (use hierarchical decomposition for larger processes)
  • add checkpoints between key steps
  • don't loop back past checkpoints
Several of Dr. Samarin's presentations on BPM and SOA are freely available on Slideshare. So are several interesting presentations on BPM by Sandy Kemsley.
OptimJ
In the previous issue, we mentioned Ateji PX, a Java extension for parallel programming targeted at effective use of multi-core CPUs.
From the same company comes OptimJ, a Java extension with support for writing optimization models (e.g., "constraints" and "minimize" statements) and powerful abstractions for bulk data processing. The language is supported by programming tools and language-aware editing under the Eclipse environment.
Cloudwatching
Researchers at North Carolina State have developed "context-aware" models that predict anomalies in a hosted infrastructure based on certain patterns of system activity. They claim a 50% improvement in the rate of anomaly detection before an outage occurs, with 80% fewer false positives. The NCSU paper, entitled "Adaptive System Anomaly Prediction for Large-Scale Hosting Infrastructures," will be presented at an ACM Conference at the end of July.
Handling the Data Deluge
The International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management, held in Germany a few weeks ago, was focused on ways to handle the petabytes of data produced by today's scientific experiments or used in statistical analysis. Read more in this Scientific Computing article.
Seen Recently
"When typewriters were replaced by PCs, a huge tech boom ensued; over the next 20 years the smart grid will (hopefully) bring similar fortunes."
-- Armond Mehrabian, via Twitter ( @Armond_M)

"I sure wish BP had been using a BPM approach on that oil rig, rather than a case management approach that allowed winging it with decisions like whether or not to use drilling mud."
-- Scott Francis, in a bp3 blog post,
" BPM vs. Case Management Yet Again"